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I think this is a good photo from Wikipedia. It shows the cargo ship with the small pirate craft right next to it and what appears to be a rope ladder of some sort attached via grapping hook to the side of the ship.
Merchant ships usually have heavier plating than warships, as they are less concerned about saving weight and more concerned about durability and loose cargo banging against the hull. (Destroyers in particular are nicknamed “tin cans” because the thin hull plating often deformed between the hull frames as a result of waves battering the ship.) Still not going to stand up to an RPG, however.
No, it’s worse. One officer of the watch and one ordinary seafarer on the bridge. The master may also be on the bridge from time to time. In daytime, there may be some other seafarers hanging about. Everyone else as you say, or in the engine room.
Bookkeeper, standard side shell plate on a vessel this size is about 10mm, (slightly less than half an inch, for the non-metric amongst you) or slightly less. So a lot less than the armoured areas of a warship, a lot more than the shell plating of some sort of lighter fast craft.
Indentation of shell plate between frames doesn’t just occur in “tin cans”: most old merchant vessels have it too: look at the pictures of the “Faina” (such as the one **Dewey **linked to) and you can see the same thing.
Princhester, thanks for the data about civilian use hull construction.
I do have one correction, however: outside of the Russian fleet, there are no armored areas of any warships on the high seas. And the Russians only have two of the Kirov-class ships in service. Per Wikipedia’s article on the class - their armor is all of 76 mm thick, and only around the reactors. Compare that to even a true heavy (armored) cruiser hull plan, like the USS Des Moines-class, with an armor belt measuring 162 mm, and you’ll see that it’s not all that much protection. Battleships carried even thicker armor.
The inch thick hull I’d mentioned was not considered armoring. AFAIK the protection it offered from small-arms was incidental to making the vessel seaworthy for North Atlantic conditions, which had been a major consideration for all US Navy vessels build during the Cold War. AIUI a modern warship’s protection lies far more in compartmentalization than in any attempt at armoring. Well, that and no longer building ships with aluminum superstructures. :eek:
How long would it really take for someone to whip out a couple dozen
Of these or something similar. Small crews, bristling with guns, fast, manuverable, and in the grand scheme of naval vessels pretty darn cheap.
You don’t need any of the heavier ordinance so you toss them in favor of better armoring/protective measures. Drop a dozen off the coast of Somalia with a couple tenders and pirates go away.
This Somali based piracy stuff has had me thinking for quite some time.
The problem seems to be escalating - that Ukranian arms carrier should make things a lot worse.
Some time ago I saw a story about a large cruise ship that repelled Somalis using some sort of non-lethal sonic gun - they were in inflatables or semis and armed with RPGs.
Typically my reaction was that the cruise ship must be carrying arms, and people capable of using them.
Normal cargo boats probably have a sparse and spectacularly low quality crew, but were I a Lloyds underwriter I would specify two trained up crew with accurate light machine guns loaded with tracer and rounds designed to explode on impact with a rubber hull.
On a large boat, I would not fancy the chances of pirates sneaking on board by night, they don’t know the layout, motivated crew do - but anyway the Somalis seem to like charging up in a couple of inflatables waving RPGs which makes them somewhat vulnerable.
I would also expect a few ‘Q’ ships in the area, tempting looking trawlers, with a motivated crew.
Probably the Ukranian arms ship problem will trigger an appropriate response from governments - rather than waiting for actuaries and owners to come up with a solution.
Personally I have a simple solution for ships that are hijacked, moored up and awaiting ransom. Sink them. Paying ransom never works in the long term.
This kind of simplistic thinking is silly and useless. It is the same cowboy mentality that messed up so badly in Iraq: “we don’t talk with ‘terrorists’, we just impose our will”. Yeah, right.
So you just blow up the ship with hijackers and captive crew all together and then let God sort them out? No concern for the loss of innocent human life? And who is going to pay for the cargo and for the environmental mess? How many ships do you think can be sunk and innocent people killed before the world is outraged? Who is going to do this? Because under international law I doubt anyone would have any legal right to do this. This is just silly thinking.
I can’t find a cite, maybe this should have its own thread in great debates but….
I’m sure I read some time ago that the reason there were so many Somali pirates was that the couldn’t make a living from fishing, that because Somalia has no functioning central government; its costal waters are been fished empty by international fishing companies (illegally), leaving the Somali Fishermen without a means for providing for their families, and in fact forcing them to turn to pirating
Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime, force him into piracy……
Anyone advocating foreign Naval missions to pacify the waters off Somalia hasn’t thought the issue through completely. For all that everyone here is talking as though there is no government for Somalia, as well as there being no effective government within Somalia, The Somali Republic has an official, recognized, and accredited mission to the UN.
A brief look through the linked website shows that they seem to be fairly honest about just how much of the country they control, but even that unusual honesty doesn’t mean that they’re going to welcome any foreign Naval assistance, let alone a permanent UN-led Naval station.
For that matter, where would such a Naval station be placed? PT boats such as the drachillix suggests are not meant to station crews aboard indefinitely. FTM, they were notorious for not being all that sea-worthy. (Besides, if we’re going to go all testosteroney, I’d like to suggest PHMs instead. Though I’ll admit those would have a longer lead time, since all the ones that had been built are either scrapped or museum ships.) Even without that, a parts, supply and fuel depot in the area would be a necessity.
Imposing such a station in the area without real local support would be a nightmare. I’m not going to say that getting said local support is impossible, but it isn’t going to be simple, either. For one thing - why the Hell would the Somali on the street give a flibbertigibbet about international trade? One can even make the argument that the Somali Republic’s official gov’t has an obligation to use this shipping and piracy crisis to try to get a pledge for real military help for ending the civil wars.
Finally, such Naval patrols would be hugely difficult. The pirates are using motorboats, AIUI. Ask anyone who has worked Counter Narcotic Operations just how difficult it can be to get a radar signal off of a vessel that extends no more than five feet above the water’s surface - especially if there are any kind of swells. From what I recall the way that the US Coast Guard’s CONOPs are going these day is that they make extensive use of overhead surveilance, and then vector in interception ships. To achieve the same kind of cover in the waters off Somalia would require a much larger Naval station, than the one I’d been talking about just for a few patrol craft. Or - station a carrier battlegroup off the Somali coast. Which sure as Hell sounds like using an M1A1 Abrams to swat a horsefly.
I don’t want to give the impression that it’s impossible to patrol those waters, nor that Naval missions in the area are useless. I just have the impression that the people advocating “sending just a few patrol craft” into the area haven’t thought about the logistical or political obstacles to such a course of action.
I’m honestly very skeptical. Modern piracy is a global phenomenon anywhere you get poor countries with rather sloppy law enforcement and high volumes of shipping. Somalia gets a lot of press because of the rather telegenic ‘steal a whole ship and hold it for ransom’ approach they can get away with due to the total lack of a government, but I beleive attacks tend to be along the lines of:
[ul][li]Steal everything the crew own, and any small valuable pieces of cargo, at machete point. Then run[*]Put the crew over the side (lifeboat optional), sail the ship somewhere dubious, sell cargo and ship.[/li][/ul]
If you take a look at this rather nifty map from the International Marine Bureau, you can check out the distribution and attack types. Interestingly they rate Nigeria and Indonesia as being much riskier than Somalia - although it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the Somali attacks end up being scored to Tanzania, Kenya or Yemen.
That would work fine, as long as you stay in international waters. Ports tend to frown on firearms on civilian boats. Not being able to put in to port might harm profits a bit.
I would like to see a little more discussion on this issue. What exactly are the maritime regulations restricting merchant vessels from arming themselves with machine guns and small arms to repel pirates? Have there been any treaty negotiations to ease the restrictions? One would think it would be easy enough to establish procedures to stow the weapons as a vessel enters port.
Easy enough to hide them too. There is no way they are going to do a thorough search of those huge ships. There must be another reason.
So you think it is a good idea to enter a foreign country breaking the law with the hope that the local police will not find out? What happens if they find out by chance? What happens if Seaman Klutz has an axe to grind and reports to the police?
The police find drugs and other hidden contraband all the time. They may seem stupid and they may even be stupid but sometimes even a dead fish finds a nut. Do you think it is a good idea for a master to enter foreign ports breaking the law all the time? Wouldn’t he be sorry sooner or later?
Beside the point: I do believe vessels flying foreign flags are entitled to possess firearms in port so long as they are securely stowed and locked and as long as they are legal to possess under the flag of the vessel.
I used to be a supply chain guy, I understand the logistics involved. IIRC we already have bases in Yemen just a couple hundred miles away. Assuming Kenya or Djibouti would be unwilling (I’m not up on our diplomatic status with them).
Im not talking about literally dragging out the old PT boats, thats why I said “something like” and specified tenders to allow them to linger on station for a while maybe even sleep on the tender or have rotating crews stationed on the tender to keep them fresh and well provisioned.
True the old PT’s were not the best example of seaworthiness, but at the same time we have learned a thing or two about keeping a small boat on top of the water since then.
drachillix, fair enough. I wasn’t expecting you to go grabbing PTs out of museums, anyways. Like you said, they were cheap, quick-to-build boats that could pack a lot of punch.
I just like the idea of doing a 21st century version of the PHMs. 
More seriously, I know that each of the hurdles I mentioned could be dealt with, but they will add both lead time, and costs, for any solution of that nature. And while I’m not up on how Kenya and Djibouti feel about the piracy in their region, ISTR that another hot spot for piracy - the Malaysian Straits - has huge hurdles with the Indonesian government allowing foreign flagged vessels to do any serious policing.
Historically it’s not uncommon to have local governments supporting piracy while at the same time decrying it on the larger stage.
I tried to find out in a previous thread, but the information is hard to come by. The best link I found was this:
http://www.mast-yacht.co.uk/firearms.asp
Previous thread:If you’re hired to protect a large cargo carrier from pirates how do you arm yourself?
On another note, good to see you back, sailor!
Good luck trying to pierce 8mm of steel plate with a .45 pistol. Unless of course you use cop-killer bullets 
Really? ISTR seeing on a documentary that the magazine aboard American aircraft carriers are rather heavily armored to protect from outside attack (for obvious reasons, you wouldn’t want hundreds or thousands of tons of high explosive munitions getting cooked off), but then again, I think I saw this on a TV show, so it could be wrong.
Oh, so fun fact, by World War II, most battleships lacked much in the way of hull armor plating. IIRC, they had a belt of armor to protect from torpedo breaches, armor protection for the power plants, weapons systems, magazines, and C&C, and then sometimes just enough armor over the crew sections to make the crew not feel naked. The idea was to minimize the overall weight while maximizing the protection. You basically ended up with an armored “raft”, which would still be capable of floating and fighting even if the entire outer portion of the ship had been shot off.